Category Archives: 2024 Articles

by Tyler Foerst

In February, right after qualifying ended for their City Commission with only the incumbents qualifying, the Mayor of Newberry, Jordan Marlowe, and his group launched a $115,000 effort to take over the three traditional public schools in Newberry and convert them to “public” charter schools. The difference being that traditional public schools have to take every child, whereas charter schools can be more selective while still receiving public funds.

In Florida, a parent can petition a public school to convert it into a charter school. The intention of the law was to enable small communities to keep their neighborhood public schools open in the face of school closures brought about by the defunding of public education by the Legislature.

Looking for a unique weekend activity you can bring the whole family to? The Gainesville Roller Rebels are playing two home games this month. On Saturday, June 15, GRR will take on Swan City Roller Derby. And on Saturday, July 6, the Swamp City Sirens and the Millhopper Devils home teams, both made up of GRR skaters, will face off for the second time ever! You won’t want to miss these hard-hitting games.

This month at the SPOHP, we are  highlighting our second interview with Dr. Bruce Purnell in May 2023. Dr. Purnell is a descendant of John Jones, William Whipper Purnell, and others who were involved in abolition and the struggle against slavery in the United States. Dr. Purnell shares his family history and tells us about how the Underground Railroad inspired his current work in community healing and activism. You can watch this interview with Dr. Purnell at tinyurl.com/Iguana1985.

C: My name is Donovan Carter. I’m a researcher with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, with my friend, Kristen Anderson. We’re both recent graduates from the University of Florida. 

A: My name is Krystin Anderson. I’m also a recent graduate of the University of Florida with my bachelor’s in anthropology, and a minor in ethnomusicology. I’ve been researching with SPOHP for the past two years. 

C: Thanks so much again, Bruce. This has been super exciting to hear from you. Can you remind the people who you are?

P: I’m a psychologist by trade, founded a community-based organization called The Love More Movement. The mission is to heal from past trauma and move the transformation through a vibration of love. And it’s intergenerational. Our oldest I think is ninety-four. Youngest is like two. So, we believe that we have to heal together. That’s the solution of many of our problems is healing from past trauma. We use the metamorphosis of the caterpillar to the butterfly as our guiding metaphor for the entire piece. If you trust love enough, to enter your cocoon for transformation, then you’re gonna come out flying, you know? Also, we wrote a curriculum for life coaching to kind of break the stigma from mental health. So instead of calling it therapy, we just say transformation. And you becoming a life coach, committing to healing yourself, your family, and your community. We have a cultural movement called the Overground Freeway. Whereas the Underground Railroad was about physical freedom, the Overground Freeway is about mental liberation. So same way we have stations, we try to form stations the same way. My family in Canada, the Shadd family, if I go back to my own genealogy I go back into the Underground Railroad and find my Underground Railroad family. There’s a lot of connections so we have stations put Overground Freeway that way. 

The League of Women Voters of Alachua County (LWVAC), in collaboration with the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida, will be hosting two candidate forums this election season covering primarily the local races.  

The forum on June 23 at 1 pm at the Ocora Room at the Graham Center on UF’s campus covers the primary races. A general election forum will be held on Sep. 22 on the Santa Fe College Campus, also at 1pm (location TBA).

University of Florida Performing Arts (UFPA) to host 24|25 Season Preview on Tuesday, July 16, at 7 p.m., at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 3201 Hull Rd. This event is free and open to the public. Attendees will get a sneak peek of more than 40 performances by Grammy award-winning and world-renowned artists slated for the upcoming season. Director Brian Jose will introduce artists through a presentation in which he shares his excitement about season highlights. 

by Lucinda Faulkner Merritt

This amendment creates an enforceable, fundamental right to clean and healthy waters, authorizing a person to sue for equitable relief when a State executive agency, by action or inaction, allows harm or threat of harm to Florida waters. See more at  https://www.floridarighttocleanwater.org/

A quote on Facebook recently caught my eye: “One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work.”

Thinking back on the 10 years I spent working for the Ichetucknee Alliance, during which I also did some work for the Silver Springs Alliance and helped at the founding of the Florida Springs Council, I can vouch for the truth of that quote.

by the Gainesville Radical Reproductive Rights Network & Planned Parenthood Generation Action – Santa Fe College Chapter

In response to the Dobbs decision, released in 2022, Floridians Protecting Freedom headlined a petition campaign to gather signatures from Floridians, to place an amendment on the November 2024 general election ballot to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. 

By the January 2024 state deadline, the campaign submitted over 1.4 million petitions to supervisors of elections across the state, surpassing the required 891,523 validated petitions. On April 1st, the Supreme Court of Florida decided that Amendment 4 will be on the November general election ballot. Amendment 4 reads as follows: 

There will be a lot of local races on the ballot, this is a preview of what’s coming, but incomplete because the filing deadline has not been reached. The Iguana leans pro-Democratic because, well, history … Other candidates may still file, so that may force some primaries for August. Following are the probable ones for August. 

If you are travelling this summer (or just don’t want to or can’t leave the house), it’s important to have an absentee ballot so your voice is heard. 

by Sarah Rockwell

In the ongoing battle for civil rights and social justice, a new front has emerged in Florida: the fight against book bans. 

Across the state, a small but vocal group is attempting to control the narrative in our schools, dictating which books children can access and what histories they are taught. These efforts threaten to undermine the principles of equality and freedom that are the bedrock of our society.

by Nick Smith

Dozens of protests and campus occupations erupted at the end of the 2023-24 spring semester and many are still ongoing in solidarity with the Palestinian people as Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza. Columbia University’s students acted as the epicenter of this movement with its students demanding divestment from companies that profit off of the war in Palestine. These demands from protestors are modeled after the Anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s and the protest tactics resemble the sit-ins of the Anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s.

by C. Gordon

With Florida’s recent acquiescence to the six-week abortion ban, and with elected officials from other red states threatening to “monitor” women’s fertility and possible pregnancies, it is not surprising that women’s health and reproductive rights are driving progressive voter turnout this election cycle. 

It is a welcome surprise that a first-time candidate for public office has, more than two months before the August Primary, proactively crafted legislation that addresses a key part of these abuses.

by Joe Courter

Some say, as a counterpoint to the oft-heard cliché, that “history doesn’t always repeat itself, but at times it does rhyme.” 

I just read a book that took me back to those times of dynamic change, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “An Unfinished Love Story.” It is a book with first hand observations about trying to bring the idealism of the 60’s into reality through the core of young speech writers and advisors to JFK, LBJ and RFK in the period from 1959 to 1968. 

by Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson

What is it about Gainesville Regional Utilities that makes it worth fighting over? Every decade or so, GRU faces a new existential crisis, yet our community has frequently played an outsized role in national utility policy as a result of decisions made in our little petri dish.

Gainesville’s utilities became “owned by the people it serves” over a hundred years ago when the private electric utility turned off the power to the streetlights over a billing dispute — so the City took over. Gainesville’s willingness to entice the University of Florida with free water in perpetuity is credited with swaying the decision to locate UF here. In the 1960s, little old Gainesville won Supreme Court cases against Florida’s investor-owned utilities which required these large private companies to inter-connect their lines with the smaller public utilities — forever changing the reliability and the marketing of electricity across the nation’s electric grid.

Since October, university students have been escalating campaigns for divestment from genocide, many culminating with encampments springing up nationwide

by Aron Ali-McClory, National Co-Chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America

“Intifada, Intifada — Globalize the Intifada!” is a chant which has been heard across the country since October, when student protestors first rose up across the country to demand an end to the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, part of the broader Nakba (lit. The Catastrophe) which has been perpetrated against Palestinians since 1948. While the chant might be alienating to many, the word originated in the Palestinian context to describe mass student protests in the early 1990s, while in the Arabic language the word intifada (lit. shaking off) it used simply to describe resistance against oppression. 

The June-July issue of the Iguana is now available, and you can access it here! If you want to get your hands on a hard copy, check out our distro locations here.

Florida ‘callously’ strips healthcare from thousands of children despite new law
Gov. Ron De Santis’s challenging of a ‘continuous eligibility’ rule has booted over 22,500 children off insurance since January
by Richard Luscombe ~ The Guardian ~ April 29 ~ tinyurl.com/Iguana1988
The DeSantis administration has stripped Medicaid “KidCare” coverage from at least 22,000 needy Florida children — probably illegally. 

House GOP committee pits young against old
Mainstream media often gets it wrong these days when covering Social Security
by Tia Maria ~ Gainesville Iguana ~ June 1 ~ tinyurl.com/Iguana2002
It’s not just seniors who should be concerned about cutting social security — young people will need their earned Social Security benefits perhaps even more than their parents and grandparents. Let’s change the conversation from cutting benefits to increasing revenue sources.

By Tia Maria

Mainstream media often gets it wrong these days when covering Social Security. Details from current Democratic proposals to strengthen the program and Republican proposals for cuts, such as raising the retirement age, usually are lost in the verbiage of the overly confident, or are just ignored completely.

But young people will need their earned Social Security benefits perhaps even moreso than their parents and grandparents. One main reason is that previous generations relied on income from pensions in their retirement years. Today, pensions are rare and 401(k)s depend on Wall Street in a market subject to extreme volatilities. Think of 2000, 2008 and 2015. Add to this decades of tax cuts for the wealthy resulting in the inequality, poverty and homelessness we see today. 

by Bill Gilbert

We are being overwhelmed by our failure to keep up with change. Forty-six percent of the American population, according to recent studies, experience stress, anxiety and/or depression.

The United States has the worst social record of any developed country in the world and many developing countries. The character of a society depends on how it treats its most vulnerable members: the poor, minorities, children, elders, and immigrants, LGBTQ, and migrants. We are: number one in prison population with 2.3 million people incarcerated, first in teen birth rates, and some of the highest rates of STD’s, first in illiteracy, poverty, racism, homelessness, income disparity, child hunger, child poverty, drug use and drug related deaths, use of antidepressants, violence, firearms deaths, not providing access to health care for all of its citizens, not providing child care for working parents, never-ending inflation, the most military spending, hazardous waste production, recorded rapes, and the poor quality of its public schools, and lowest in life expectancy. This is warp-speed decline.  Some political observers call the inability of government to solve these problems, ‘constitutional rot,’ that has contributed to wrong decisions in the past.